New Bedford has come for the publishing industry — for its “Big Five” publishers and its MFA-trained fiction writers — in the form of Romantasy, a new genre rewriting all the rules, perhaps for the better. The portmanteau term, for the uninitiated, means “any fantasy novel that has romance as the main plot or a strong side-plot”, according to Katie Cunningham, owner of Kiss & Tale books in Collingswood, NJ. The books also tend to be hashtag-friendly, include explicit sex scenes, and wildly sample from the folkloric palate of tropes and subgenres established by previous narratives: Hades and Persephone, love triangles, friends-to-enemies, shapeshifters, slavery, Greek Gods, dragons, and vampires, to name just a few.

The combination of romance and fantasy isn’t new, of course. Stephanie Meyer’s Twilight, published in 2005, was a breakout success that mainstream publishing has strived in vain to replicate ever since. But it wasn’t until TikTok that readers got together and demonstrated through their choices and enthusiasms just where the sweet spot lay.

The numbers speak for themselves. Five of the top-10 best-selling titles of 2024 were written by the category’s two most prominent authors, Sarah J. Mass and Rebecca Yarros, according to Publisher’s Weekly statistics from October. Bloomberg estimates that in 2024, Romantasy books achieved $610 million in sales, up from $454 million in 2023. The category is juicing the statistics on overall book sales, which are in decline, and has contributed to a boom in romance-focused bookstores in the United States.

“It has been amazing and crazy to me how busy we’ve been,” says Cunningham. Katie Steele, the Romantasy expert at A Novel Romance, a Kentucky bookstore, says that demand was so high the owners moved to a new space “10 times the size” after only a year in operation. Steele’s other topic areas are manga, danmei (Chinese novels with male-male, or MM, romance), and queer.

Victoria Gerken, the publisher of Podium Entertainment, a digital-first publisher that has moved into print distribution on the wings of Romantasy, believes the genre has been so successful because it “provides entertainment for its audience that’s not available in any other format”. This entertainment is a form of escapism that allows women whose daily lives have little magic in them to imagine themselves as bold and powerful, starring in an exciting adventure and having great sex. Perhaps it’s the chick version of the thrill that men get from video games. It’s also worth noting that the magical framing allows women to perform girl-power and to be swept off their feet by men (or male beings) who are unapologetically dominant and boast castles and domains, too. Between the genre’s unique pleasures and an audience Gerken describes as “voracious”, she says “it’s a little bit of a perfect storm. The demand has always been there, but nobody harnessed it.”

Just how a multibillion-dollar industry devoted to selling books managed to miss the demand is an interesting question, but it’s clear that the category is being driven by authors and fans, with little distinction between mainstream and self-published titles.

The first breakout Romantasy title was the conventionally published Sarah J. Mass series A Court of Thrones and Roses (#ACOTAR), a young-adult fantasy romance in which a young woman falls in love with a Lord of the Fae. The series began publication in 2015 but blew up online during the pandemic, around the same time its publisher, Bloomsbury, reclassified it as an adult due to its increasingly graphic sexual content.

Yet sales are also being driven by the proliferation of self-publishing platforms, with authors increasingly winning a following as self-published audiobooks, e-books, or print-on-demand, and only later making deals with the corporates. One of the current best-selling titles, Quicksilver, another Fae romance, just appeared in print through Forever, an imprint of Hachette, in December 2024. Author Callie Hart had published several previous series as e-books or print-on-demand through Amazon’s CreateSpace, and it was only after Quicksilver’s success online that she teamed up with the French giant. Podium Entertainment’s Gerken says that “the vast majority” of Podium’s title acquisitions are independently published first.

A January 2025 story in The New Yorker on a copyright infringement lawsuit against publisher Entangled and author Tracy Wolff, the creator of best-selling Alaska-based vampire-romance series Crave, contained a quote that generated some pearl-clutching by writers online. An anonymous writer who’d had dealings with Entangled told The New Yorker that its publisher and CEO, Liz Pelletier, said to her that “the problem with traditional publishing is that they just let writers write whatever they want, and they don’t even think about what the TikTok hashtag is going to be”. From a traditional viewpoint, that sounds like the death of creativity and a loss of authorial control.

The New Yorker story also reports on several other objections to the genre. It’s allegedly not diverse (often written by socially conservative and photogenic white women with good social-media skills); it moves very quickly, sometimes forcing writers to adhere to brutal delivery dates with little time for polishing their work; and it can be relentlessly formulaic, with the huge volume of titles contributing to the problem.

From a different viewpoint, however, the trend is empowering authors who are able to build their own fan base. Companies like Podium and Bloom Books, a new independent romance imprint that launched during the pandemic, offer the kind of hybrid rights deals traditionally forbidden by major publishers. Bloom’s star client is E.L. James, whose Fifty Shades of Gray was originally published as an e-book and print-on-demand title in 2011. It’s one of a growing number of publishers whose business model is to scoop up successful self-published authors, often allowing them to keep their lucrative e-book and audiobook rights, while supplying the kind of print distribution and brand-building muscle that independent writers find difficult to achieve. Authors working with such publishers can sometimes retain creative control of cover design and marketing strategy. And they can reap dream benefits, such as the publisher’s ability to send out expensive influencer boxes or put their work out in gorgeous deluxe or collectible editions, another publishing trend that has synergy with the Romantasy market.

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In defence of fantasy

By Mary Harrington

A perusal of popular Romantasy titles reveals perhaps even more groundbreaking developments. Blue Box Press co-founder Liz Berry, speaking to Publishers Weekly, says of star author Jennifer Armentrout that “she has a capability to drive the plot and romance forward, while mixing character development with high-concept plotting, that few people have”. I found this type of clean forward motion — a grasp of the essentials of storytelling — in all the highly recommended titles I tried. I also found tight writing and world-building, atmospheric and fun detail, crisp conflicts, exciting high stakes, and two engines of narrative pleasure — a romance plot and fantasy-adventure plot — for the price of one.

There’s a common opinion in writing and publishing circles that the reason for declining book sales is that the readers are uninterested in or unable to appreciate great work. However, in the mega-hits of this unusually reader-selected genre, there were few of the errors that make bad mass-market fiction so bad, such as inconsistent characters with unclear motivations, convoluted plotting, unnecessary detail or description, and clunky dialogue. The knack for keeping the finger on the pulse of the story tends to cut away such dross, and the readers, it turns out, can recognize it.

The readers don’t care, however, about most of the rules of good writing. The Romantasy characters I encountered were psychologically consistent, but not necessarily complex or psychologically real. The prose was sometimes laden with clichés. Every broomstick offers an echo of Harry Potter, every magical wall taps Game of Thrones. And the narrative voices are quite simply contemporary, regardless of where in time or space the books are set. Characters in Medieval-ish settings have thoughts such as “painkillers are awesome”. They use the magical equivalent of the internet, love fashion and shopping, have anxiety attacks, and display modern values like girl-power and casual promiscuity.

Romantasy writers are the lawless “bumpkin dandies” found in Melville’s New Bedford, for sure, but they can tell a great story, and I found something liberating in their freedom. If more writers were trying to grab readers directly, literature would be better off.

God help all of us, Rule 34 has been working its magic on recent Washington politics. I’m not talking about the way the real-life dating history of the sort-of-historian, Trump cheerleader and convicted felon Dinesh D’Souza — who is on record as having courted both Laura Ingraham and Anne Coulter at one time or another — resembles a discontinued experiment in alt-Right “slash” fanfiction. Nor the grisly real-life sexual behaviour of the beltway hanger-on Jason Miller. Nor, indeed, those indelible images of Rudy Giuliani adjusting his trousers on a motel bed in the new Borat movie.

No, I’m talking about the equally grim but at least victimless proliferation of Trump-era erotica available at knockdown prices in Amazon’s Kindle store. There’s really quite a lot of it, and some of it is very eccentric indeed. Of course, as much as you can put it down to Rule 34, it seems likely that a handful of PhDs are going to be spawned by this stuff. For my recent survey of the canon suggests that most of the authors are not aiming to arouse a sexual response in the reader so much as to make the reader gag — with laughter or revulsion.

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Harry Potter fans need to grow up

By Sam Leith

That makes sense, anthropologically. After all, lewd sexual depictions have long been a primary recourse of political satire. Think of the filthy late-medieval flytings of Skelton, the restoration rumpty tumpty of the foul-mouthed Second Earl of Rochester, the earthy vulgarity of a Hogarth or a Gillray; or in our own age the early work of Gerald Scarfe or the Spitting Image material that was too rude to put on TV. The high-quality stuff survives — Rochester was a first-rate poet — but you can be pretty sure that in each age any number of talentless poetasters and loo-wall scribblers were likewise aiming their political commentary below the belt.

Take “Chuck Tingle” (I suspect this of being a pseudonym; apologies to Ma and Pa Tingle if I’m wrong). One of the most prolific pornographers on the Kindle Store, Mr Tingle makes up in productivity what he lacks in literary — and he certainly seems to have taken an interest in the day-to-day beltway news cycle, as well as being jolly keen on bottoms. One of the many titles available at the time of writing was Domald Tromp’s Ass Is Haunted By The Handsome Ghost Of His Incriminating Tax Returns.  Or: Lindsey Ram’s Ass Is Haunted By The Physical Manifestation Of His Hypocritical Words About Not Filling A Vacant Supreme Court Seat During An Election Year Which He Specifically Ask To Haunt Him.  

One of the things you’ll notice about Mr Tingle’s work is characteristic of much of this subgenre of erotica. Its authors are far more cautious about libel lawyers than they are about family values campaigners. So “Lindsey Ram” is in no way to be mistaken for the senior senator from South Carolina with a similar sounding name, and likewise any resemblance between “Domald Tromp” and Donald Trump is entirely a trick of the reader’s imagination. In Dirty Debate: When the Masks Come Off, by “Byron Buffoon” (again, apologies to Ma and Pa Buffoon), the elderly but Viagra-toting protagonist is a presidential candidate called “Hoe Bi-man”. Attending a masked Hallowe’en party at the White House, he finds himself snatching a moment of sordid passion with “President Hump”. “Will you shut up, man?” he exclaims at one point. “I can’t stand your voice but goddamn this ass feels amazing.”

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Why doesn't porn ever get cancelled?

By Sarah Ditum

We should at least consider the possibility that real sexual feeling is involved, of course. Could all this be a sign that the ferocity of the culture wars, like Beatrice and Benedick’s “merry war” of courtship in Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing, is the proxy for something else? After all, it’s a law not just of the internet but of the human libido that the more taboo something is the more arousing some people are going to find it. As Woody Allen (don’t @ me) said: “Is sex dirty? Only when it’s being done right.”  Does it, perhaps, account for the flowering of fantasies in which  political passions are channelled into baser enthusiasms? Is there a love-across-the-barricades, opposites-attract thing going on, in which milquetoast liberals secretly dream of being given a good seeing to by a hairy QAnon Shaman or a redneck in a Maga hat?

Honestly? I doubt it. Most of these stories show signs of having been written at some speed, and with drink taken. Donald Feels the Bern, by Cliff Fuxtable, has a bash at dramatising the psychosexual tensions between Left and Right. It opens with an “ageing Marxist” on a bar stool, drinking Pabst Blue Ribbon, fulminating against the Koch Brothers and wondering if the struggle to which he has devoted his life was worth it: “Just once, thought Bernie, I’d like to give the 1% a taste of their own medicine. Give it to ‘em nice and hard.” Happily, he gets the chance when a billionaire called Donald walks into the bar, and soon they’re in the toilets, reaching across the aisle. “Bernie had to admit that cavorting with a chivalrous billionaire was more arousing than he expected. Perhaps he could spend less time railing on the 1%,” it occurs to our hero, “and actually start railing the 1%.” The scenes that follow would give Lou Dobbs himself nightmares.

Charlie Dirk’s Ins-erection At the Capitol sees a Maga-hatted Capitol invader coming upon a wizened turtle-man (actually a turtle, for some reason, but let’s pass over that): “one of the traitors he hunted — a sitting US senator”. But rage turns to passion and “within seconds the two star-crossed antonyms were deeply intertwined…”. The old senator’s “papery old skin” is said to slap against the young stallion “like take-out crepe – pliant, somewhat warm, but still enjoyable”. 

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Why can't the Left let go of Trump?

By Kat Rosenfield

The protagonist of Babs Fluffmore’s I Pr0ned the GOP Platform is a liberal-minded seductress whose “almighty magic hooha” is carving a bisexual trail of havoc through a Republican convention in the romantic city of Cleveland. The story takes a strange turn halfway through when she steals a printed copy of the GOP Platform and uses her magic hooha to bring it to life. “It had transformed from a multi-strategic manuscript to a strong, attractive man… his body was composed of pages fluttering with excitement… ‘Shadows of Schafly!’ I exclaimed. ‘It’s so big!’”

We are in the realm, here, not so much of proper erotica as of home-made satirical invective. From this point of view, then, T-Rex Pounds Presidential Butt by Buster Fritz is part of a distinguished literary and philosophical tradition that includes Aristophanes and Juvenal. But there again, it’s also about a President Tramp (the name thing again) and his successor President Byeden taking turns to be goosed in the caboose by a priapic dinosaur.

I’m afraid that though I have tried hard to find a sample of this story suitable for quotation on a respectable website such as this one, the project defeated me. Suffice to say it involves a lot of dinosaur dingus, and that if that’s your bag you’ll find it free to read with KindleUnlimited, and it may one day be a set text for your grandchildren’s GCSE History.